How to awaken your inner curiosity

Great thinkers and innovators also swear by allowing your mind to wander
Photograph: Canon

Albert Einstein thought he had no special talents. “I am only passionately curious,” he said.

While Einstein may not have considered curiosity a talent, in our times it has become an all too rare luxury. We have greater ability to explore ideas and artforms than any other generation, but it often feels like we spend less time chasing our curiosity than any other generation. There’s always that call, text or email that requires our immediate attention instead.

But curiosity is a crucial part of who we are and what we do. When Henry Miller, author of Tropic of Cancer, turned eighty, he reflected on his life and career. Much like Einstein, he stressed the importance of letting his mind wander.

Perhaps it is curiosity, that made me the writer I am.

If you’ve begun losing your curiosity, don’t fear, there are ways you can cultivate your curiosity.

Daydreaming might seem like the most unproductive, inefficient thing you can do with your time. But counterintuitively, if you allow your mind to drift away and follow your own curiosity, you may just be led to some of your biggest creative breakthroughs and insights. When your brain is not directly focussed on a particular task, some psychologists suggest that it is given the space to draw connections it might not ordinarily make. So while it might seem indulgent to stop banging your head against the wall over a work problem, you might have that eureka moment when you zone out and least expect it. “Why do I get all my best ideas while shaving,” Einstein, who had his share of eureka moments, once wondered. Perhaps it was the daydream effect.

If you think you might need more structure or discipline, enrol in a class that interests you. Photograph: Colin Baker/Canon Collective

If you think you might need more structure or discipline, enrol in a class that interests you - even if it’s not related to your career.

Steve Jobs famously never finished university. But before he dropped out, he decided - out of curiosity - to drop into a calligraphy class. He became infatuated by the subject, and a few years later, found some use for it.

“When we were designing the first macintosh computer, it all came back to me,” Jobs told Stanford graduates in a commencement speech. “We designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.”

If a class is too much trouble, it might help if you just go offline for a while - of course only after finishing this article.

“The web threatens habits of deeper inquiry,” writer Ian Leslie argues in his book Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It. He believes that having Google at our beck and call means we’re less likely to remain curious. “It doesn’t give curiosity time to incubate and grow,” he writes. Sounding a warning to all of us who rely on the internet to instantly satiate our curiosity, he says “curiosity is a muscle, use it or lose it”.

And if you’re really struggling for ways to awaken your curiosity, just ... improvise. Seriously. You’re probably familiar with improvisational comedy, but are you familiar with the philosophy behind it?

To get the ideas flowing they needed to get the blood flowing Photograph: Colin Baker/Canon Collective

The improv motto is “Yes, And”. This means that an improv actor always tries to say yes to the premise laid out by another improv actor, and build on it. As Tina Fey, the former Saturday Night Live writer-performer who got her start doing improv comedy explains, “if we’re improvising and I say, ‘Freeze, I have a gun,’ and you say, ‘That’s not a gun. It’s your finger. You’re pointing your finger at me,’ our improvised scene has ground to a halt. But if I say, ‘Freeze, I have a gun!’ and you say, ‘The gun I gave you for Christmas! You bastard!’ then we have started a scene”.

To often in life we don’t say yes when the person we’re talking to offers a curious conversation path to go down. Why not say “yes, and” instead?

“Your best ideas can come from the silliest ideas,” says Charna Halpern, co-founder of the ImprovOlympic training centre that Tina Fey attended.

And, if all else fails, take a long walk.

We often think of creativity as being a solitary struggle, the tortured artist sitting solemnly at their desk long into the night. But for many, to get the ideas flowing they needed to get the blood flowing. Ludwig van Beethoven and Gustav Mahler, two of the greatest classical composers, would always take a long walk after lunch, stopping to write down any ideas they had along the way. History has now proven that their idea-generating jaunting is actually backed by scientific evidence. A 2014 study from Stanford University suggests that walking increases creative inspiration. So why not let your feet do the thinking and head for a stroll.